A series of linux shell scripts for converting audio formats in batch process, example .wav to .flac or .m4a to .mp3 and .flac to .wav etc.
Reasons for scripts These were orignally created for batch processing of multiple audio files with a one simple command. Just navigate to the directory where the audio files are and run the appropriate command.
If you have a PLEX server and you can't get the server to find your .flac files even though they are there, the flac to flac scripts will usually cure most of these issues.
You can also extract audio directly from webm and mp4 video formats.
- linux system
- ffmpeg
Clone repo, or download zip file and unzip. From terminal, cd to directory AudioConversionScripts and run the command:
rsync -a acs ~/.local/bin/
This will copy the folder "acs" to your local/bin directory.
Next,the scripts need to be made executable by running these two commands:
chmod +x ~/.local/bin/acs/*
chmod +x ~/.local/bin/acs/.acs
Edit your ~/.profile and ~/.bash_profile and add the following at the end of the file:
PATH=$PATH:~/.local/bin
PATH=$PATH:~/.local/bin/acs
Logout of your session and log back in and verify the scripts are in your path:
echo "$PATH"
The scripts by default are set to use 2 threads, you can change this by editing the script directly and changing the FFMPEG flag "-threads 2" what ever number of threads you want. But for those of you with many threads, you are limited by your IO, so too many threads can actually hurt performance.
You can edit any script with a text editor, either graphical or gui, example using the command line with the nano editor.
nano ~/.local/bin/acs/flac-m4a-44
Because the scripts are in a folder that is in your PATH, executing the scripts is easy. First to see all of the current format combinations, open a terminal and type:
.acs
Be sure to include the period at the beginning. You should see a list like this
- flac-flac-43
- flac-flac-44
- flac-flac-48
- flac-m4a-44
- flac-m4a-48
- flac-ogg-44
- flac-wav-44
- flac-wav-48
- m4a-flac-43
- m4a-flac-44
- m4a-flac-48
- m4a-mp3-44
- mp3-m4a-44
- mp3-m4a-48
- mp3-ogg-43
- mp3-ogg-44
- mp3-ogg-48
- mp4-flac-43
- mp4-flac-44
- mp4-flac-48
- ogg-m4a-44
- ogg-m4a-48
- wav-flac-43
- wav-flac-44
- wav-flac-48
- wav-m4a-44
- wav-m4a-48
- wav-mp3-44
- webm-flac-43
- webm-flac-44
- webm-flac-48
The script name says what it does, for example "wav-flac-48" means that the script will convert files with a .wav extentions to .flac with a sample rate of 48000. Make a copy of a directory with audio files with an extention of either flac, m4a or mp3 etc. Open a terminal in that directory and if your files are .flac, and you want to convert them to .wav, simply type: flac-wav-48 and the script will convert all files in the current directory to .wav files.
The numbers at the end of the file name represent sample rates:
- 43 = 43200
- 44 = 44100
- 48 = 48000
To encode files in .m4a, ffmpeg will need to have libfdk_aac enabled/compiled.
NOTE: The existing files will be deleted, so ALWAYS work with copies of original files.
If you have other formats that you would like to convert, you can easily use any of of the existing scripts as a template. The only thing that need to be changed is the iext & oext extensions and the FFMPEG settings line if applicable. Save the file under a new name in the acs folder and make the new script executable. Do not add the .sh extention to the new script.
When editing the FFMPEG flags (the green box in the above image), it is imparitive that the spaces before and after are there (red arrows) or the script will fail. You can add as many flags in the green box as necessary.
To batch process multiple directories, a separate script will execute the necessary script per directory. simply edit the bulkbatch file in ~/.local/bin/acs with your favorite editor. Edit/add the directories in the the section ***User Section ***. Please note that you may encounter errors in transcoding which causes the script to stop. As always, never work with origianl files, ALWAYS copies!
To use the script, once edited to your liking, simply run bulkbatch from the terminal, does not matter the location where the script is executed.